Sunday, October 15, 2023

I enjoyed Olga Ravn's "The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century"

"Severance" meets "Roadside Picnic." The story, about the crew of a spaceship on an extremely long voyage and suffering strange effects from the combination of that isolation and the weird influence of alien objects they brought on board, is almost entirely told as paragraph-long excerpts from the crew's statements to human resources. And because it's told in that manner, it enjoyably invites the reader to do a lot of work filling in the gaps of the story.

But it abandons the format at the very end to spell out things that really didn't need spelling out.

The novel is available at Amazon

Also, and I don't recommend looking at this unless you've read the book and maybe not even then, the featured rooms and hallways of the ship, and the alien objects housed within, exist--you can see them in this gallery installation.